How many two-term presidents should have settled for one?

Nearly all of them

Joe Biden’s shaky performance in his debate with Donald Trump last week has led to calls from both parties for him to abandon his campaign for a second term. The central argument of the critics is that Biden’s age is showing and will keep him from being an effective president in a second term. Such assertions have to be taken with a grain of salt coming from Republicans, who doubtless would want him to be an ineffective president if reelected. But with both parties, the age issue is crucial.

History would agree, up to a point. Age-related infirmity has troubled second terms for certain presidents. Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in 1919 incapacitated him, leaving the country in the hands of his wife and personal secretary. Dwight Eisenhower’s energy never recovered after a 1955 heart attack. Ronald Reagan’s second-term forgetfulness presaged the Alzheimer’s diagnosis he received after leaving office.

But the bigger problem is with second terms themselves. It’s hard to name a president whose second term wasn’t worse than his first. George Washington’s second term saw the emergence of partisan warfare, which was what caused him to call it quits after two. Thomas Jefferson’s second term produced the disastrous embargo of 1807. In Andrew Jackson’s second term his vendetta against the Bank of the United States destabilized the American economy. Ulysses Grant’s second term brought scandal; Franklin Roosevelt’s, the court-packing fiasco; Richard Nixon’s, Watergate; Reagan’s, Iran-contra, Bill Clinton’s, impeachment.

The reason second terms are so disappointing is that in their first terms presidents burn through their good ideas, their A-list of appointees, and the political capital that won them their office. The slogan in almost every campaign for reelection is “Let’s finish the job” or its equivalent. Rarely do candidates even bother to present new ideas. 

Partly this is because by a second term a president’s opponents have figured out how to stymie him. Even Roosevelt, reelected in a 1936 landslide, couldn’t keep Southern Democrats on board with the New Deal, to the point that he campaigned against conservative Democratic incumbents in 1938—and lost. The only thing that saved FDR’s second term was World War II, which revived the economy and made possible his third and fourth terms.

Second terms are chiefly exercises in vanity. Presidents like the prestige and perks that come with the office. They like imagining they’re indispensable. They want to cement their legacy, their place in the history books.

They’d do a better job of that by stepping aside when they’re popular enough to influence the choice of their predecessor. Theodore Roosevelt could have run in 1908 but didn’t, instead ensuring the nomination of William Howard Taft, who rode TR’s continuing popularity into the White House. Calvin Coolidge could have run in 1928, but instead let Herbert Hoover take his place. Taft carried on in TR’s progressive footsteps, and Hoover in Coolidge’s conservative ones. That Taft’s presidency was later spoiled by TR’s irrepressible ego, and Hoover’s by the Great Depression, doesn’t alter the lesson of what a president willing to put cause and country ahead of immediate personal gratification can do.

Biden’s reelection theme is a particular verson of the finish-the-job syndrome. In 2020 he promised to save America from Trump. He won and has since gone far toward restoring the dignity of the presidency and the standing of America in the world. Now he’s saying he has to do it again, lest all the good work be undone by Trump’s return to office.

He’s right that the job has to be done. A Trump victory in 2024 would be a far bigger deal than his victory in 2016. Then he took America by surprise. People didn’t know what they’d be getting when they voted for him. Today they know exactly what they’ll be getting.

The question for Biden, and for all who agree with him that Trump must be defeated, is whether Biden is the candidate most likely to accomplish that. No one knows the answer. Everyone has to guess.

Until now, the Democratic party has acceded to Biden’s argument that he’s the one. He’s the only Democrat to have beaten Trump. He did it before, and he’ll do it again.

But Biden’s hardly an impartial judge in his own case. No one ever is. Yet he’s the one who will render the verdict—on himself. This is why someone on his team, or among his closest advisers, or in his family, should make him watch the video of the debate and ask him if he really thinks he’s the Democrat most likely to keep Trump out of the Oval Office. If he says yes, that’s the end of the story. And probably of his presidency in January of next year.

But if he’s wavering, they could throw in the lousy-second-terms argument. It strains imagination to think a second Biden term will be as good as the first term, whatever you think of the first term. The best Biden will be able to say is that he kept Trump out of office.

But for four more years only. If Trump should lose this year, he won’t go away. He’ll likely be back in 2028, claiming he didn’t lose in 2020 and didn’t lose in 2024. In 2028 he’ll be only a year older than Biden is now.

And he won’t be running against an incumbent, if the president then is Biden. But if the president is a different, younger Democrat, that president might finally ring down the curtain on Trump and Trumpism. Or hand things off to another Democrat who will.

Trump is playing a long game. The Democrats had better do so, too.